About Me

Kristin Bricker is a freelance journalist and translator. She specializes in militarization, social movements, and the drug war in Latin America.

Kristin is a contributor to the CIP Americas Program. She previously served as the Security Sector Reform Resource Centre's Latin America blogger. Her work has appeared in NACLA, the Huffington Post, IPS, Foreign Policy in Focus, Counterpunch, Telesur, Rebelión, Left Turn, The Indypendent, Upside Down World, Por Esto!, The Guatemala Times, and The News (Mexico). Kristin has appeared on Al-Jazeera, Democracy Now!, Radio Mundo (Venezuela), Morning Report (New Zealand), Radio Bemba (Mexico) and various Pacifica radio programs. Her work has been cited in the Los Angeles Times, Proceso, and the Congressional Research Service's Report for Congress.

Kristin contributed a chapter about Mexico's peace movement to Global Fire, Local Sparks, published by the Indypendent.

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Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The following communique came across my desk. Hopefully the attention it is drawing will prevent the sort of violent attack the locals fear. Unfortunately, the last time a communique from Honduras came across my desk, it was to warn that a coup was about to happen...

Peasants from the Unified Peasant Movement of Aguán (MUCA) do have reason to fear a massacre: over the past three months, eight of their organization's members have been assassinated. According to the humanitarian organization Ayuda Popular Noruega, attempts to link those murders to guerrilla movements or drug traffickers "arouses the suspicion that propaganda is produced with the goal of justifying the human rights violations that have been unleashed since [the coup that occurred on] June 28."

Here is the communique, reprinted in its entirety from Quotha.net. In the English version I bolded two words that I changed from the original translation to clarify some confusing wording.

For several hours now, neighbors of the city of Tocoa and surrounding areas have denounced through El Libertador that they have been under a state of siege, without the authorities responsible having issued any notice or explanation.

Issued at 00:15 Monday April 12

Aguán Region. In the major cities of the department of Colón, in the Northeast of Honduras, a state of siege has been illegally enforced, with the aim of preventing residents of the region from going to the aid of the campesinos who are on the farms, as it is expected that in the coming hours, members of the army, national police, and mercenaries—all working for landowners Miguel Facussé Barjum, René Morales Carazo and Reinaldo Canales—that have invaded the areas in question, to murder everyone they find (children, adults, the elderly and women) in their path.

This act of intimidation arises on the eve of a definitive solution that members of the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán (MUCA) have been negotiating with the government of "Pepe" Lobo and the National Agrarian Institute (INA), to return the lands that were fraudulently expropriated in the decade of the 1990s, when Rafael Leonardo Callejas was president and Juan Ramón Martínez was director of the INA.

Sources on the campesino farms report that numerous military transport vehicles are bringing motorboats to enter the plantations via the Aguán river. Nonetheless, they have been kept covered with tarps to prevent suspicion, and have been transported toward the region of San Esteban (Northeast Olancho) with the aim of going unnoticed. Also being transported are assault tanks, the same that were used to take over the Presidential House during the military coup d'etat in June, 2009.

The imminent military and paramilitary aggression could leave thousands of dead and gravely wounded people behind, many of them minors, since there is a high concentration of children and elderly on the farms, whose lives have been on the razor's edge since January, when the dictator Micheletti ordered the systematic repression and murder of members of MUCA, which to date has had six people killed, and twelve people in the Guadalupe Carney community, located in Trujillo, which has experienced similar luck.

The National People's Resistance Front (FNRP) holds Presidente Porfirio Lobo Sosa and the current Secretary of Security, Oscar Álvarez Guerrero, responsible for continuing the war against the campesino movement, and for preventing a definitive solution from being reached.

We have uploaded several videos taken from cameras located in various strategic points in Tocoa, so that the population can see the military presence in the zone.